5 Top Tips for Recycling Success in Your Office

1. Think about what type of waste your office produces

• Carry out a waste audit to find out what it is you’re throwing out, and then get in touch with your existing refuse collectors to see if they offer a recycling service for your most common rubbish
• With 70% of the UK’s office waste being paper, there’s a very good chance that this will make up the bulk of your refuse. Introducing a paper recycling scheme alone will have a terrific impact, but there’s more that can be done
• Food packaging, including drinking cups and cans, is the next most common waste generated in the UK’s offices. So it’s important to think about two key things: firstly, how to ensure that the food and drinks containers you buy for your staff are made of recyclable material; and secondly, how you will go about recycling them after they’ve been used
  
  

2. Find a contractor that meets your business needs

• If your existing refuse collectors don’t collect recycling, there are a number of local contractors out there who will. The Environment Agency is a good starting point for finding a suitable contractor in your area
• If your small office doesn’t produce much waste, then an on-demand collection service might be more appropriate than a weekly one
• It’s also worth checking whether they need paper to be separated into card, glossy and office paper, or whether they are able to collect mixed paper
• Depending on the paper you’ll be throwing out you may also want to consider a service that includes the safe disposal of confidential or commercially sensitive material for shredding and recycling
  
  

3. Aim to buy recyclable products

• Zepbrook’s Bagasse plates are made from sugar cane leaf and thus 100% biodegradable and as such are proving particularly popular with our environmentally-conscious customers
• Our water cooler bottles are made of polycarbonate and are fully recyclable
• We also provide plastic vending cups and foam cups made from polystyrene that can all be recycled. We recommend you get these recycled through the Save-a-cup scheme, which was set up by the vending industry in the early 1990s. Save-a-cup provides bins to help your staff easily recycle vending cups and all other forms of paper and polystyrene cups
  
  

4. Make recycling bins easy to access throughout the office

• Many recycling contractors can provide suitable bins to help your staff separate plastic bottles drinks cans and PET packaging
• It’s important that you give some thought as to where you place these bins. For an office recycling scheme to really work, it needs to be easy for your staff to understand and convenient for them to use. Place bins in the most appropriate places, such as in the cafeteria and beside the vending and photocopying machines. You’ll also need to provide training for staff and clear signage
  
  

5. Elect a recycling champion and review your efforts

• Office recycling works best when the entire workforce has bought into the project. It’s important that senior management is involved, and that full-time, part-time and contracting staff are all aware of the scheme and its objectives
• Appointing a coordinator or recycling champion to lead your efforts and communicate with other staff will help educate employees. The coordinator should also celebrate the achievements of the scheme once it’s up-and-running, as this re-emphasises the objectives and inspires workers to keep up their good efforts
• An entirely new office recycling programme doesn’t have to be introduced overnight, and a more gradual approach can be the most effective. Be sure to review your scheme after the first few months, and then introduce further reviews on an annual basis
  
  

We hope our 5 top tips will help you launch or improve your recycling scheme. Having a programme in place is just one step on the path towards becoming a more environmentally conscientious business; but if you’re serious about lessening your company’s impact on the environment then you should also be looking to buy more recycled products and generally produce less waste. Encouraging staff to print on both sides of paper and unsubscribing to unwanted post are often easy wins.